Who won the day? Newt Gingrich

By ALEXANDER BURNS

12/30/2011 08:37 PM EST

Make no mistake: this was not a Hillary Clinton-in-New Hampshire moment for Newt Gingrich.

But if choking up in a coffee shop is unlikely to revitalize the former House speaker’s presidential campaign, it at least gave him a respite from being portrayed in a relentlessly negative light. Shedding a tear while talking about his late mother may or may not make Gingrich more sympathetic to Iowa voters, but it probably didn’t make things worse. For him, that’s about as good as it has gotten lately.

Today, it actually got a little bit better for Gingrich, thanks to a late-in-the-game endorsement from Iowa talk radio host Steve Deace. A bigtime Mike Huckabee supporter in 2008, Deace no longer occupies the same seat at WHO Radio (that belongs to Simon Conway, who endorsed Rick Perry Friday.) His endorsement counts for something, however, and it’s the first nod of any significance that Gingrich has earned in Iowa in quite some time.

The overall trajectory of Gingrich’s campaign is still unmistakably downward, as a morning NBC-Marist poll showed him essentially tied for third now in Iowa, with Rick Santorum and Rick Perry. To even have a shot at third, though, Gingrich needed to arrest his collapse. He needed what the professionals call a “moment,” and he got one. Whether it does him any good, we’ll have to wait and see.